On the road one day in New Orleans, I spent some time in the Crescent City Farmers Market and got a lesson in étouffée-making from the doyenne of Louisiana home cooking, Poppy Tooker. Étouffée is a riff on the old French verb “to smother,” and while there are as many recipes for étouffée as there are cooks who make it, this one is so easy that it’s become an instant classic in our house. I can’t imagine a better meal than a pot of étouffée, some rice, a salad and a ripe piece of fruit for dessert. —Andrew Zimmern

At his restaurant, John Besh simmers the broth for his bisque with the crushed shells of whole blue crabs. Chopped shrimp boiled in their shells flavor the broth for a home version of Besh’s tapioca-studded bisque.

In Louisiana, a po’boy is a soft baguette filled with either fried seafood or meat. Melissa Rubel makes her po’boys with juicy grilled pork patties, topped with lettuce, tomato and a crunchy-creamy pickle-and-shallot mayonnaise.

This creamy sweet potato filling is actually fairly simple, but Donald Link opts to prepare the crust by hand; he also tosses the salad with mustard greens, which can be tricky to find. In the easy way, make the crust in a food processor and substitute watercress for the mustard greens in the salad.

In New Orleans, red beans and rice are traditionally served on Mondays because the dish uses up leftover Sunday ham. Grace Parisi likes making the recipe any day of the week, and she replaces the ham with smoky bacon.

“Deep in the Louisiana bayou, Cajuns still live off the land—trapping, shrimping, crabbing and hunting,” says Andrew Zimmern. “Cooks make gumbo with nutria, a giant, water-dwelling rodent. It’s a dish of need, not want. I learned my gumbo techniques from a trapper’s wife, but I use oysters and crab; no rodent required.”

This recipe calls for Louisiana Gold Pepper Sauce—its pure chile flavor isn’t masked by the addition of vinegar, which some purists think interferes with the subtle flavors of foods like the buttery crab and andouille sauce that tops the succulent sautéed snapper here.

Typically, in this popular Acadian classic, it's chopped chicken livers and ground meat that make the rice look "dirty." For our special version, we've left out the livers and added shrimp but kept the rest of the usual lineup—onion, celery, bell pepper, and garlic.